The always antically brilliant Gary Shteyngart tethers his narrative to a diminutive muse and spins out a sublime dystopian fiction

Gary Shteyngart's third novel, Super Sad True Love Story (Random House), had to be a total blast to write. It's an homage to science fiction, George Orwell's 1984 in particular, with a satirical postmodern overlay of authorial wish fulfillment.

In a world much like ours, only worse—New York City is a police state overrun with ­national guardsmen from the provinces, the dollar is ­"yuan-pegged," everyone has melded with his or her handheld media device (called äppäräts), books are considered smelly artifacts, and people are ashamed to be caught reading—Lenny Abramov, a balding, doughy, nerdy, book-loving 39-year-old son of Russian Jewish immigrants, falls in love with Eunice Park, the beautiful, tiny, cynical but sweet, shopping-obsessed 24-year-old daughter of Korean immigrants. Amazingly—­because in spite of their differences they're kindred spirits—she loves him back.

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As the world around Lenny falls violently apart, he's buoyed and distracted by his tender passion for Eunice, who calls him "tuna" and "jerkface." He tries, and fails, to interest her in literature. In two of the novel's best set pieces, they meet each other's families. And they both, in their ways, try to make the world a better place.

The text consists of Lenny's diary entries and Eunice's e-mails to various friends and family. They both write with endearing, sometimes clumsy earnestness, and their intertwining narratives, for all the book's cheeky darkness, pose a superserious question: Can love and language save the world?